short answer

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A FLOOD OF FIRST CONTRACTS Jon Schleuss has a problem other union presidents would be happy to have: more fi rst contract negotiations than he can handle. As newly-elected president of the NewsGuild-CWA, Schleuss took offi ce after a hotly contested recount in December 2019 and on a wave of new organizing in the journalism industry that included his own workplace, the Los Angeles Times. With the international union adding just shy of 1,500 new members in both 2018 and 2019, and another 1,350 in 2020, Schleuss’s “number one goal” since taking over leadership of the union has been to build capacity for bargaining at new and existing shops. Though Schleuss’s ambition to transform the NewsGuild into an organizing union—one shared by a growing number of leaders within the union—is not limited to collective bargaining, the demands of negotiations have created particular urgency around building the capacity of Guild members to win great contracts.

It’s an uphill battle. The very public infl ux of new members from prominent media outlets has brought new energy to Guild locals and the international union, but dwindling advertising revenue and the near-complete takeover of the

Case Study NewsGuild-CWA

Photo: Kent Nishimura

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industry by vulture capital have led to shrinking and shuttered newsrooms and stark fi nancial realities for many represented shops. The remaining Guild members are the ones who have hung on through rounds of layoff s and buyouts. Guild shops are spread thin in small and scattered newsrooms across the country.

Despite the overall state of the industry, the NewsGuild’s newest members have been winning

at the bargaining table. Indeed, the union need look no further than some of its own fi rst contract campaigns for examples of highly transparent member-led bargaining producing huge victories. At both the L.A. Times and digital media company Law360, bargaining committees of rank-and-fi le members have used structures built through new organizing to move newsrooms of in-person and remote workers to take increasingly militant workplace actions. Though neither local practiced “big” bargaining, high transparency and largely open negotiations sessions helped to maintain momentum from organizing drives through long campaigns to win life-changing collective bargaining agreements.

HORRIBLE BOSSES In 2016, the L.A. Times ownership company revealed its dramatic rebrand: instead of Tribune Company, it would now be known as Tronc, short for Tribune Online Content. “It’s about meeting in the middle, having tech startup culture meet a legacy corporate culture and then evolving and changing. And that’s really the fun part,” said the company’s Chief Digital Offi cer in an introductory video to employees that seemed custom-designed to be mocked on Twitter. The new name wasn’t the only shakeup. Tronc brought in new leadership and proposed to dramatically boost revenues through automating the production of video content, the latest and greatest “pivot” for print newsrooms. The technological side of the proposal was vague, but its underlying ambition was clear: to produce more and more easily shareable online content while employing fewer and fewer journalists.

NewsGuild-CWA: The NewsGuild-CWA represents more than 25,000 journalists and other media workers at 200 print and digital media organizations in the United States and Canada. Founded as the American Newspaper Guild in 1933, the NewsGuild merged with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in 1995. www.newsguild.org

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The Tronc rebrand was just the latest in a long slew of upheavals at the company. Since leaving family ownership in 2000, the L.A. Times had gone private through a leveraged buyout, declared bankruptcy, emerged under yet another set of owners, spun off as a publishing-only company, and went public once again. Caught

between a legacy corporate culture with a storied history of anti-unionism and a tech startup culture that glorified doing more with less, the staff at the L.A. Times began to organize. “We had the dictionary definition of horrible bosses,” said Anthony Pesce, a former graphics and data journalist at the Times. “Just cartoon character evil overlords.” Galvanized by severe pay disparities, decades of layoffs that had brought the newsroom down to 400 from a peak of 1,200, and deeply unpopular management, workers were ready to fight for greater stability and a voice in their work. Carolina Miranda, an arts writer (now arts columnist) who had been at the L.A. Times for three years, had previously taken buyouts at two prior media outlets. “It just became so clear when taking those buyouts how critical union representation is. I looked at my L.A. Times contract when I was hired by Tribune and it was at-will employment. There were no guarantees of anything.” Miranda, Pesce, Schleuss, and others started secretly talking to their coworkers about organizing. After a majority had signed up in support of the union, they presented Tronc with a demand that the company recognize their union in the fall of 2017.

Tronc refused to agree to voluntary recognition and made it very clear through captive audience meetings and all-staff emails that management vehemently opposed the campaign. But they were too late to slow the organizing efforts already underway. Convinced by that point that they needed new ownership in order to achieve any of their goals in bargaining, the organizing committee focused in on getting rid of Tronc. Putting their reportorial skills to work, they wrote and released a report detailing the exorbitant compensation paid to Tronc executives. In the context of the company’s financial troubles and cuts to the newsroom, the report was a powerful indictment of the paper’s prioritization of short-term profits over real investment in quality journalism. Soon after, the newsroom filed for an NLRB election. In the week before the vote, the paper’s top editors wrote to the newsroom in an attempt to third-party the union, framing a vote in favor of union representation as a loss of worker agency: “The question to

First Contract The first collective bargaining agreement reached following union recognition, in which the workers seek to establish core principles such as just cause and union jurisdiction. Under current labor law, workers often face similar union-busting tactics when negotiating a first contract as they do in seeking union recognition. First contract negotiations are often quite lengthy and may fail to result in an agreement.

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you is do you want to preserve your independence and the independence of the Los Angeles Times or do you want someone else negotiating on your behalf?”

In early January 2018, L.A. Times reporters, data journalists, copy editors, photographers, videographers, web and audio producers, page designers, librarians, and other workers voted 248 to 44 to join the NewsGuild. The unit included not only the main newsroom in downtown L.A., but community newspaper offices throughout the region and scattered remote workers. Through

bargaining, it would later grow to include the paper’s Washington, D.C. bureau. A month after the election, and on the heels of revelations that Tronc had been setting up a “shadow newsroom” to replace unionized employees with new non-union hires employed by a separate business entity, the company announced it was selling the paper to a new owner. Management’s anti-union email had presented a false choice. By organizing, the newsroom had been able to regain its independence from Tronc. And the newly-minted L.A. Times Guild members would be heading to the bargaining table to negotiate for themselves.

If the Tronc era at the L.A. Times showed the strains of a 140-year-old print newspaper transitioning to a modern media company, Law360 represents a new model. A subscriber-only newswire with legal news and analysis for practitioners founded in 2004, the company quickly grew and was acquired by LexisNexis, a subsidiary of RELX, “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers.” On the one hand, the newsroom seemed stable and well-funded, buoyed by a much larger business enterprise. On the other, Law360 reporters, editors, and news assistants faced managerial practices unheard of in traditional newsrooms. For Jody Godoy, a general assignment reporter who came to Law360 after several years working in journalism (and has since moved on to Reuters), “Just right from the jump the conditions there weren’t that great.” She had come to expect extreme penny pinching from media companies. But Law360’s corporate approach was next level, with strict productivity requirements and legally-questionable overtime restrictions. General assignment reporters faced four-story-a-day quotas, while editors were expected to review 15 to 20 stories a day. “They had the day divided up into basically two-hour increments, two hours for each story,” said Juan Carlos Rodriguez, another general assignment reporter. “And it didn’t matter if the story was just a short little press release or a 75-page opinion from an appeals

We had the dictionary definition of horrible bosses.

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court. You had the same amount of time. You had to crank out 500 words.” While Tronc had envisioned a future in which video production could be automated, the journalists at Law360 were already being treated like robots. Claiming overtime was not only highly discouraged but also financially penalized, with the company adopting a “flexible workweek” approach that meant employees were paid a lower rate the more they worked rather than earning time and a half. For Godoy, who had relied on overtime at past journalism jobs to achieve what felt like reasonable take-home pay, the situation at Law360 left her fuming. “The idea that you would do work and not file for overtime was just something that I couldn’t stand for because even though in the past I had been paid less than I thought I was worth, at least I was making overtime so it sort of made up for it.”

The problems bubbling under the surface came to a head in 2015 when management bucked industry practice and moved to enforce a noncompete agreement against a former employee who had left to take a job at Thomson- Reuters. The reporter, Stephanie Russell-Kraft, was promptly fired from her new job. “That made everybody really mad in the newsroom,” said Rodriguez. “A lot of us have worked other places. A noncompete in journalism is just not a thing. Law 360 required them, usually they gave it to you when you started at the company and they told you, ‘Oh yea, don’t worry about that, that’s just for the tech side,’ or whatever. Nobody really thought about it…until [Russell-Kraft] got fired.” Rodriguez and his coworkers realized the issues they were experiencing in the

L.A. Times Guild members wearing union t-shirts to work personalized with the bargaining demand they cared most about. Credit: L.A. Times Guild

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Law360 newsroom could follow them even if they tried to move on to another news outlet. “It was just a mess,” said Godoy. “Once we started talking, we realized we were all suffering because of the practices there.”

The Law360 newsroom began to organize and started reaching out to unions. With the help of the NewsGuild, the New York Attorney General launched an investigation into the company’s noncompete policy. In June 2016, workers scored their first victory as Law360 agreed to discontinue the use of noncompetes. A month later, the organizing drive went public. Despite a concerted anti-union campaign, the newsroom voted overwhelmingly, 109 to 9 in an NLRB election, to join the NewsGuild that August.

TRANSPARENT TRANSITIONS It was a new day at the L.A. Times. The paper had been sold to a local owner—a billionaire bioscientist named Patrick Soon-Shiong. And the newsroom was finally union for the first time in its long history. But as the now-official L.A. Times Guild geared up for negotiating their first contract with unfamiliar management, they faced an immediate dilemma. “It was simpler in a way to run

our campaign against Tronc because it was this big national news chain that wasn’t invested in our newsroom and didn’t have our best interests at heart,” said Matt Pearce, a political reporter and member of the original bargaining committee. As the campaign transitioned from a fight for recognition to a fight for a first contract, they couldn’t just beat up on Tronc anymore. “We got this new owner

who was signaling that he wanted to invest in the newsroom and had a long-term interest in seeing the paper survive and have people work there. That checked a lot of boxes for us for some of the demands for why we formed a union.” The interim executive council, made up of members put forward by the organizing committee and elected by acclamation, were nervous about striking the right tone for their coworkers and their new management. “Tronc was a great bad guy that you could pin all sorts of stuff on because they were just so awful. And this new owner we didn’t know as well,” said Miranda, the arts writer. “So we couldn’t just go attack him. But we also didn’t want to roll over. There were certain things we were working towards with our contract, so how do you strike that balance?”

Once we started talking, we realized we were all suffering because of the practices there.

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At Law360, the organizing committee faced a similar dilemma. The noncompete policy, an early motivator for unionizing, had been eliminated before the union had even been formally recognized. Nonetheless, support for continuing the union drive stayed strong, with many in the newsroom seeing a collective bargaining agreement as a way of addressing problems endemic to the journalism industry. “I’ve been in media for a while and I know the precarity of it,” said Braden Campbell, a senior reporter covering labor and employment issues who later served on the unit council, the elected leadership group for the Law360 union. “I was at a newspaper before and survived a few rounds of layoffs and then I was at a website before Law360 where I got laid off. Thankfully, Law360 is a very stable and thriving place, but I have a good sense of the importance of having our own say in matters [and] the ability to not be purely at the whims of management.” A contract would allow workers to have a say and ensure that the stability they felt would be lasting.

Indeed, at the L.A. Times, it didn’t take long for the newsroom to be reminded they were still at the whims of their boss. As his first act as owner, Soon-Shiong called a town hall and announced that the company’s offices would be moving from downtown L.A. to El Segundo, 17 miles further south and west on traffic-choked freeways. The L.A. Times no longer owned its historic downtown offices—the valuable real estate had been sold off during the bankruptcy—but the company had still leased the building. Soon-Shiong wanted out of the exorbitant rent and for the newsroom to move into a building he already owned. Guild members were caught off guard and they weren’t happy. Members tried to bargain

The L.A. Times bargaining

committee at the negotiating table,

including from left to right, Matt

Pearce, Kristina Bui, Anthony

Pesce, Carolina Miranda, and Alex

Wigglesworth. Credit: Jay L.

Clendenin

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over the change—first over location, then over the open-plan layout of the office— and got nowhere. “For a lot of people that was the moment where we realized, oh, he’s going to be really helpful for us, he’s going to do a lot of the financial stuff we want him to, but also he’s still a billionaire and is going to do billionaire stuff and make decisions that people don’t think are desirable,” said Pearce. “You still want to have a seat at the bargaining table for exactly this kind of thing.”

With new ownership, new management, a new office, and negotiations still on the horizon, the organizing committee saw their role as an important source of openness and information about what exactly was going on. “We had been dealing with a company that was so used to doing things behind closed doors and

then at the last minute announcing these fait accompli to the staff. So for us it was important to operate as transparently as we could as a union,” said Miranda. As the Tronc era came to a close, the L.A. Times Guild took an important step in signaling both what and how it would be fighting in negotiations. In anticipation of negotiations, the unit had filed an information request for detailed pay data for bargaining unit members. They had publicized their bosses’ compensation as part of the organizing drive. Now, they were going to publicize their own. Spearheaded by Pesce and other data reporters, the organizing committee performed an analysis of pay within the newsroom by gender, race, and ethnicity, releasing the results in a detailed report to the entire unit and the public at large. The findings were striking: not only were women and Black and Latinx reporters underrepresented in the newsroom, but they were paid significantly less than their white male counterparts. The median gender gap was $14,000 while the gap between white journalists and journalist of color was $19,000.

The Guild’s public transparency reaped new rewards when, soon after taking over as owner, Soon-Shiong went on a hiring spree. The bargaining unit grew by around 100 new workers, many of whom had been following the union campaign and were eager to get involved. “We were concerned that we were going to have to reorganize all these new employees to get on board with the contract campaign but ironically what we found was a lot of our new employees were super excited about the union…because our campaign, our organizing campaign had been so public that the public had been educated about our drive. A lot of the other professionals in our field were kind of excited about what we were doing and wanted to be a part of a newsroom that was very active,” said Pearce. “We basically organized them before they came in the door.”

Information Request A formal request from the union to the employer for payroll data, hours of work, schedules, staffing, financial data, or other information that may inform the union’s proposals and bargaining rationales. A benefit of the legal right to collective bargaining, the employer must comply. If they fail to do so, it is an unfair labor practice.

NewsGuild-CWA

First Contract Fights

Part 1: STEERING THE PROCESS Danielle Smith had been at Law360 as a news assistant for just over a month when the unionization campaign went public. The news assistant position was her first job out of college and she wasn’t sure what to expect. But when she saw her coworkers organizing it was clear to her that she should get on board. “It was very much a well-organized movement that I wanted to be a part of,” she said. Seeing the company’s anti-union campaign only made her more invested in the fight. Just five months later, following their overwhelming vote to join the NewsGuild, she accepted a nomination from her coworkers to join the Law360 union’s unit council, a group of 31 leaders from throughout the newsroom of about 140. As the contract campaign progressed, Smith also joined the diversity committee, the environmental committee, and the socials committee, with the union’s organizational structure growing to engage more members in more ways. Other coworkers from the unit council including Juan Carlos Rodriguez formed a bargaining committee, which also included Godoy. “We had a court reporter, a couple of senior reporters, a couple of general assignment reporters, a copy editor, and a news assistant,” said Rodriguez. “And we had four women and four men… Diversity and inclusion was always a huge issue to us from during organizing and that’s reflected in the makeup of our unit council and our bargaining committee.” The newsroom also formed a mobilization committee, a form of contract action team, to develop workplace actions as part of the contract campaign.

Law360 union members during a walkout outside the company’s New York offices. Credit: Law360 Union

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At the L.A. Times, the outgoing organizing committee put together a slate of candidates to form what they called an interim executive committee, like Law360’s unit council, to help lead the unit through its upcoming negotiations. “From the beginning I would say it felt like an organizing drive where our newsroom was setting the terms for the union itself, not just the employer,” said Pearce. “So when we were organizing the contract campaign we went through it with a very similar attitude I think which is that we always from the beginning assumed that our members were going to be steering the process and were going to be the ones in charge.” The interim executive committee was affirmed by acclamation and included Pesce and Miranda as co-chairs, along with Pearce, coworkers Alex Wigglesworth and Kristina Bui, and others. The executive council in turn assembled a nine-member bargaining committee that would be in charge of negotiations. “It was really important to us that we have a really diverse bargaining committee,” said Pearce. “We wanted to have a very wide array of jobs represented at the bargaining table. We also wanted to have a diverse group by age, race, and gender.”

By having the executive council select the bargaining committee, Pearce and others hoped to avoid having a committee “loaded with reporters,” far and away the biggest group in the newsroom. In particular, they were anxious to include a photographer as that department had been the “biggest worst”—the most challenging area of the newsroom to organize during the union’s initial campaign. Fortunately, Jay Clendenin had emerged as a leader and agreed to be a part of the team for negotiations. “It was very important that Jay be on the bargaining committee to send a message to the photo department that their interests were going to be literally represented at the bargaining table,”

said Pearce. “One of the concerns that we were dealing with was that the reporters are just going to gang up on the photographers and take things away…we felt like if we didn’t have a photographer on there we would lose a lot of credibility.” In addition to the bargaining committee, other members of the original organizing committee formed a campaign committee, their version of a contract action team, to plan workplace actions.

The first task for the newly-formed bargaining committee was to conduct a unit-wide bargaining survey. The committee opted to go deep, with a seven-page online survey containing detailed questions about bargaining priorities as well as detailed demographic information, including age, race,

Biggest Worse The largest job classification, department, or area with the least union support and/ or the strongest anti-union sentiment. An organizing campaign should focus on identifying and recruiting organic leaders in the biggest worst.

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ethnicity, tenure at the L.A. Times, length of journalism career, and job title. The survey also included space at the end for members to flag other issues. Delegates from throughout the newsroom were charged with distributing the survey and having departmental follow-up meetings to go over the responses and identify any issues that weren’t captured in the survey results. “We did it pretty methodically,” said Bui, a copy editor who served on both the interim executive council and the bargaining committee. “We set up a Google folder where everyone could drop their notes from those department meetings and we set up a spreadsheet where we could track ‘Have you gone to this person and asked them to do the survey? Have they confirmed that they did their survey?’” The multi-step process took a few weeks, but all of the follow up paid off. By the end, a supermajority of the bargaining unit—289 out of 380 people—had completed the seven-page survey. The bargaining committee compiled the results into a report and shared them back with the rest of the membership. “A lot of people’s relationship with data collection is you ship it off to some crazy corporation and you never see it again,” said Pearce. “Our attitude was if you’re going to give us data, we’re going to collect it and we’re going to give it back to you so that you can see where you stand and you can see what other people’s priorities are. Because we had a lot of people with a lot of different jobs and a lot of different life situations and it was important to us that people understood that their own situation may be dramatically different than others.”

At Law360, the bargaining committee and mobilization committee worked together to encourage their coworkers to fill out a similarly extensive bargaining survey. “Just like in organizing, we reached out to every single person in the unit at least once for a one-on-one conversation,” said Rodriguez. “Everyone had an ask from someone on the bargaining committee or the mobilization committee to fill out the survey.” After the survey was complete, the bargaining committee

How do we take some of these very complicated, very arcane issues we’re discussing in the bargaining committee and translate them into something understandable to someone who’s not following them blow by blow? And not only translate them, but make them care?

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digested and shared the results in two meetings made accessible to the company’s remote workers. Rodriguez as unit chair and the Guild’s representative, Susan DeCarava, held two zoom sessions to walk the unit through the results and an outline of bargaining proposals. Some broad priorities had clearly emerged, including raises, fixing the overtime system, and establishing just cause protections, which would prevent the company from firing workers without any justification. But some job-specific issues rose to the fore with particular intensity as well, including the need to reimagine the role that news assistants

played in the newsroom. In an industry which relied heavily on unpaid internships to credential early career journalists, thus limiting career opportunities to those who could afford to work for free, the news assistant role was a too-rare paid entry-level opportunity to get a foot in the door by doing background research for stories. But the way the position was currently structured, it was difficult for news assistants to then move up into other roles. “They were forced into these just mind-numbing jobs of scrolling through court dockets and other news websites looking for stories to pitch for other people to do. They got paid $40,000 per year in New York City, and they were never given an opportunity to write their own stories,” said Rodriguez. “There were maybe 15 of them…But it was important to the bargaining committee to make sure that they were placed at the same level in terms of their priorities as the senior reporters or the senior editors.”

Part 2: CONSTANT COMMUNICATION As the L.A. Times Guild got into bargaining, the interim executive committee was determined to keep the level of communication high. Miranda and Pesce had originally planned to divide their co-chair responsibilities so that Miranda would handle day-to-day unit issues while Pesce led negotiations. But Miranda quickly saw that her strengths as a communicator were needed to keep members engaged with negotiations. It was a decided challenge: “How do we take some of these very complicated, very arcane issues we’re discussing in the bargaining committee and translate them into something understandable to someone who’s not following them blow by blow? And not only translate them, but make them care?” Miranda began attending every negotiations session so she could help better communicate what was going on.

Just Cause As contrasted with the default of at-will employment, just cause requires basic due process before a worker can be fired and prevents an employer from firing a worker for no reason or a bad reason. Just cause is a fundamental protection in a collective bargaining agreement and is typically established in the first contract.

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After each session, the bargaining committee would stay in the room to draft a bargaining bulletin. “We would all be caucusing after the meeting and someone would start a Google doc and just start writing,” said Wigglesworth, another committee member who started out at the Times as a digital editor before becoming a reporter. The bulletins were detailed, including proposal language, excerpts of table talk, and context from other Guild agreements. “I think we constantly went back and forth with ‘Are we bombarding them with too much information. Are we boring them to tears with the minutiae of this article? Are we being transparent?’” said Miranda. “It took us a little bit to figure out that when we sent our updates, we would send a few brief bullet points up top. That way if all the person read was those bullet points, they’d at least have a sense of where we were. Then we would do a more detailed updated below. There were people that never read past the bullet points, then there would people who read every word and send us questions about what we were doing about x and y. But even if

people didn’t access the information, they knew that it was there and I think that was important.” Because not everyone in the bargaining unit worked out of the same El Segundo office, the emails were an important backstop for people who didn’t have stewards checking in on them in person. Drafting immediately after negotiations made for some late nights, but it was worth it. “Even when we were there until like two o’clock in the morning, we were still trying to do a memo because we felt it was really important to bring people along with us and let them know what was going on,” said Wigglesworth.

The bargaining bulletins weren’t the only emails members were getting straight

from the bargaining room. Though members could generally attend bargaining on request and there was broader turnout for some sessions, the bargaining committee were often the only members in negotiations. When the bargaining committee needed to consult with the broader membership, they would send a “quick check” out over email to the newsroom. “Quick checks were typically an email poll. Sometimes we would send out an email poll and then the stewards

Even when we were there until like 2 o’clock in the morning, we were still trying to do a memo because we felt it was really important to bring people along with us and let them know what was going on.

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would go around and nudge people to say go check your email,” said Bui. “We generally had a good sense of where people were, but sometimes issues would move quickly enough that we thought we had to do another check in.”

At Law360, the bargaining committee fell into a similar pattern of drafting a shop paper, called The Amicus, after every session. “We went into great detail about what we had done, what we had accomplished, what we still had to do, the positions that we were being met with from the company,” said Godoy. “We spent a lot of time on that after each bargaining session…It was a bit of a running joke because we had gone through such a hard day of bargaining and then we had to sit down and write a shop paper.” The work of reporting was never ending, but for Godoy it was also a personal point of pride. “It was really important for us and for me in particular to strike the right balance between motivational language and making sure people understood the stakes and making sure that things were fact-based and that they were getting the information they needed.” The bargaining committee encouraged members to contact them with any questions and feedback and would bring concerns to the next negotiations session. Later on in negotiations, the committee also began recording Facebook Live updates during caucuses or after bargaining to post on the newsroom’s internal Facebook group, another way of making sure that the unit’s remote workers were still being engaged.

Part 3: MAINTAINING MOMENTUM The Law360 union had already done away with noncompetes before ever sitting down with management. And for a while negotiations seemed off to a smooth start, with members scoring an early victory when the company agreed to do away with the quota system. “We felt like we were making progress and then all of a sudden we realized we were being slow rolled by management,” said Rodriguez. “We were starting to quibble over words in proposals or having philosophical arguments about whether it was appropriate to include a particular provision in the first contract, things like that.” Things really ground to a halt when it came time to discuss jurisdiction—the scope of work that would be covered by the union contract. Strong contract language defining the union’s jurisdiction was important to ensure that supervisors or subcontractors didn’t start to carve away at what was “union work,” reducing the size of the union over time or preventing the union from growing alongside the company. After months of back and forth to get the company to move off its initial position—no jurisdictional language whatsoever—the mobilization committee stepped into action.

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What started with Union t-shirts, signs, and buttons soon escalated to using bargaining updates as a workplace action. For 15 minutes, everyone in the newsroom would come to the front of the office or the kitchen to hear a bargaining update from the bargaining committee. Eventually the update moved to the sidewalk in front of the office. Union members had embarked on their first walkout. The next time they left for half an hour. The gatherings served a dual purpose: “It’s an action showing everyone standing together but at the same time everyone is being informed and then it’s also a public forum where they can ask questions and have things answered,” said Smith.

Looking for a way to include remote workers in the escalations, the mobilization committee decided on a work-to-rule action that would be kicked off by a sign-off email at the end of the scheduled workday. “It was a reply-all to the entire company, including managers,” remembered Rodriguez. Even though the committee had worked up to the action through escalating structure tests and felt like their coworkers were ready, it was still a scary moment. “That was a risky move because we didn’t know how many people were going to do it. That was one of those moments where you had to roll the die…you needed people who were working remotely by themselves in Michigan or in a group in D.C. or L.A. to also do it. Everyone in New York had to do it.” But the bargaining unit proved ready, and managers’ inboxes were flooded with emails from over 100 workers, a strong majority of the bargaining unit, signaling their refusal to take on voluntary overtime.

As workplace actions intensified, the bargaining committee quickly realized that these actions were the only real way to get the company to move at the bargaining table. “I had to be convinced to go along with some of the more militant stuff as we built up,” said Stewart Bishop, a senior reporter who served on the bargaining committee “Seeing how the company reacted to some of the smaller actions we took helped persuade me that the bigger stuff was good.” The newsroom was in motion, but things in negotiations were still dragging on, with wages and other economics still outstanding. As the contract campaign approached the two-year mark, they realized they needed to escalate further. The unit council decided to call for a strike authorization vote.

At the L.A. Times, the bargaining committee also grappled with the slow pace of negotiations. After carrying momentum through a year-long organizing drive,

Structure Test A mass-participation action demonstrating majority support for the union and/or particular bargaining proposals or demands. A deliberate progression of structure tests which are increasingly public and have increasing stakes allows the union to gauge worker participation and readiness to strike.

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the L.A. Times Guild had managed to keep their campaign going even after the advantageous ownership change. Another double-edged victory came when that new owner immediately put signifi cant wage increases on the table. “We were in this weird position where upfront they were being a little more forthcoming with money than I would guess most employers would be and that created a strategic problem for us because that meant that we had to be much better at communicating with people,” said Pearce. The bargaining committee leaned heavily on their communications plan but also turned to the campaign committee to keep the newsroom engaged in the fi ght.

The campaign committee developed a timeline of escalating actions to accompany negotiations—a mix of internal and public-facing, fun and more confrontational. “Sometimes we would use

caucus time to bring [the campaign committee] in and explain where we were in bargaining and where we thought the pressure points were and then they would come up with an idea for how we could press those points,” said Bui. “Towards the end the committee started coming up with job actions on their own to keep the pressure up and they would come in to let us know what they were thinking and did this make sense in parallel with what we were working on at the table.” Members wore Guild t-shirts. They changed their company Slack avatars to the L.A. Times Guild logo (nicknamed the bananaeagle). They tweeted coordinated messages about issues on the table in bargaining.

As time progressed, the bargaining committee recognized that there was a disconnect between the company representatives negotiating, including lawyers who had negotiated Soon-Shiong’s healthcare contracts, and the editors and other managers who better understood newsroom issues and were more directly being confronted by workplace actions. “I think they were trying to play an ‘out-of-mind out-of-sight’ attitude towards it and we needed to make it their problem to help us get this contract wrapped up. To make it clear that ‘if you’re

A timeline of escalating structure tests by Law360 union members in the lead up to their strike vote. Credit: Law360 Union

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not going to help us get this thing done, so we can go about our lives, we’re gonna make you miserable until then, so please come in the room with us and look us in the eyes,’” said Pearce. “We really wanted our managers who understood our work and a lot of the reasoning behind our proposals because they’re also journalists— we wanted them in the room,” said Bui. The campaign committee strategized on how to get their managers to engage with bargaining. “When managers would have a meeting every day—it was like a budget planning meeting that they would have in an open area on the fifth floor—we would have members come out in t-shirts and sit and kind of have a stare-down because there are booths all around it. And it would escalate so that one week we would just sit there and stare at them and then one week everyone’s phone alarms would go off at the same time and then we had one where we all got up at the same time and marched around and then went outside the building,” said Wigglesworth. “Having that messaging, letting people know that that’s how things were and then having those actions, it let them feel like they were helping to put pressure on management to hurry up and get furious about their proposals. I think it was helpful because we had the messaging and then we had an outlet.”

The stare-downs worked. Editors started to attend negotiations. And members turned out en masse to fill the other side of the room. According to Pearce, “We would have these very impressive bargaining sessions where we would have the entire masthead of the newspaper sitting on one side of the room and this

Law360 union members posing with Scabby the Rat as their first

contract campaign approached the two year mark. Credit: Law360

Union

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huge mass of reporters and other visual journalists on the other side of the room as the bargaining teams are sitting at the table talking to each other.” Once everyone was in the bargaining room together, the Guild finally began making new progress. “For us it was important to drag the managers into the room too because I’m sure they would have loved to be insulated from the process and have lawyers deal with their problems for them. We had this long contract campaign and things really didn’t get moving until we started demanding that our editors get directly involved.”

Part 4: GOING PUBLIC…AGAIN The fight for union recognition at the L.A. Times had been very public: “One of our strategies was to turn our company and our newsroom into a fishbowl and tweet about it and use our unique visibility as journalists to have our independent means of expression on social media to outline all the crappy stuff the company was doing,” said Pearce. But with a more sympathetic owner in place and general

reservations among many members about relying on outside support, the first contract campaign had largely remained internal to the newsroom itself. “There are a lot of guardrails around the idea that if you’re a journalist you’re objective and you don’t make yourself part of the story,” said Bui. “We knew that there would be a lot of resistance from the newsroom to trying to engage with the labor movement around collective bargaining just because a lot of journalists have very conservative attitudes about maintaining our independence,” said Pearce. When the unit did do public facing actions in

the leadup to negotiations, they had taken pains to deliberately frame them in positive and supportive terms. They held a bakesale for members of the newsroom impacted by the move to El Segundo. Later, they held a drive to urge new readers to subscribe to the Times in support of the Guild. “Every time we went to the public with some kind of ask, it took a lot of conversation with the shop,” said Bui. “When we did anything like that it was talking to membership and letting them know that we felt like this was something that we needed to do in order to build pressure and how could we do it in a way that wouldn’t make their jobs harder.

As the campaign went on and people saw what those public-facing actions could look like, they warmed up to them just by participating in them a little more.

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But as the campaign went on and people saw what those public-facing actions could look like, they warmed up to them just by participating in them a little more.”

It took a slow build throughout the negotiations process and an unexpected skirmish at the bargaining table for the unit to decide to go public once again in a big and confrontational way. The Guild had made what they thought was a straightforward initial proposal on intellectual property that addressed the rights of union members to individually profi t from their work, including through book publishing and fi lm rights. “The company came back with this completely retrograde thing basically saying we guarantee nothing and saying we not only own the rights to your work, we also own your name and the right to your image,” said Miranda. “They basically wanted a blanket release for everything so that if

some company approached them about making a podcast or movie, they would already have sign-off from us.”

For members of the bargaining committee, the issue was far from abstract. Pearce had spent years on the ground reporting on Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri. What if he also wanted to publish a book based on the reporting he had done? Without strong IP protection, the L.A. Times could claim total ownership over his later work. The issue was also strategically important because it resonated with more senior reporters in the newsroom who made more money and had generally been less invested in the campaign. The Guild

drafted an open letter to L.A. Times management signed by over 75 percent of the bargaining unit. Then members of the newsroom began tweeting publicly about the company’s proposal. Like the issue of noncompetes at Law360, the issue soon gained broader attention. The Guild’s escalation was strategically timed

A graphic created by L.A. Times Guild members to explain the company’s counterproposal on intellectual property. Credit: L.A. Times Guild

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to coincide with the L.A. Times Festival of Books, a flagship event for the paper, and generated its own media coverage and significant social media attention. The L.A. Times Guild was back in the public eye, and the open letter and the Festival of Books action worked. The bargaining committee was able to reach a tentative agreement on contract language that would protect book rights for L.A. Times journalists. And renewed public attention to the ongoing union fight at the newsroom would continue to be helpful as negotiations moved on to the topic of job security.

Part 5: THE BEST THING As the two-year anniversary of their successful NLRB election came and went, and under the banner “Two Years Too Long,” the Law360 union voted overwhelmingly in October 2018 to authorize a strike. The next day, 30 members in red t-shirts turned out to negotiations at the NewsGuild of New York offices to present their wage proposal to the company. Smith, the news intern who by that point had been able to move into a reporter role and who had sat in on many sessions, found the moment particularly moving. “All of us being there and them seeing that and how much we cared about this…I think it really did have an impact.” Following the strike vote, the mobilization committee kept the pressure up, delegating the offices of the LexisNexis CEO, erecting an inflatable Scabby the Rat outside of the Law360 newsroom, and holding an hour-long picket in the middle of the day. The company quickly caved on wages, and with a strike looming, the contract as a whole was settled in six weeks. After negotiating late into the night, the bargaining committee sent an early morning Amicus announcing the settlement.

After collecting and responding to questions through a Google form and spreadsheet and holding two newsroom meetings to review the tentative agreements, the bargaining committee held an email ratification vote. On December 18, the contract was ratified unanimously, with virtually the entire newsroom participating. “It’s hard to even sum it up,” said Godoy. “The immediate and tangible quality of life increase for the entire unit in the form of an average of 20 percent raises—it’s the best thing I’ve done in my life. That’s not hyperbole, it’s the best thing I’ve done for anyone, anywhere, anytime to be involved and help that come to pass.” The contract also memorialized the end of noncompetes and the quota system. And it included successorship in case the outlet was sold as well as strong protection from subcontracting, provisions that are particularly challenging to win in a first contract. News assistants were

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bumped up to a starting salary of $50,000 and were granted the right to receive reporter training and to begin writing stories after being at the company for six months.

At the L.A. Times, with the number of issues dwindling and contract negotiations approaching 15 months, the Guild took stock. “We made a list of the remaining issues and the bargaining committee took a full day caucus. We went into a room and sat down and did a grid of where we stood on the six outstanding issues,” said Miranda. “We held membership meetings and sent out more email blasts and talked about it in our Facebook group and said, ‘these are the things that are remaining, here’s how we view our priorities.’ As things wound down, it came to the point of ‘here’s what the membership is telling us, here’s where we think they’re willing to give in order to get a victory elsewhere.’ It was a lot of listening to people and having these meetings and being available for calls and sending the delegates out to do some of the survey work,” said Bui. Finally, in October, the bargaining committee felt like they’d gotten where they needed to—with “bulletproof” jurisdictional language to prevent the “shadow newsroom” that had loomed under Tronc.

“We sent out the full contract but we knew that people would probably not read all those pages. So we also put together a summary kind of breaking the contract up into the highlights,” said Bui. The election committee held an online vote. Out of 480 members, the unit voted 388 to 3 to ratify the contract, which included average raises of over $11,000, detailed wage scales addressing pay inequity, and just cause protection. The contract also enshrined the L.A. Times Metpro training program, which offered fellowships to early-career journalists from diverse backgrounds and provided fully-paid positions within the bargaining unit. As with the improvements to the news assistant position at Law360, the L.A. Times Guild had been able to win contract language impacting not only the workplace conditions for journalists, but also the conditions under which aspiring journalists could gain entry to the industry.

The immediate and tangible quality of life increase for the entire unit in the form of an average of 20 percent raises—It’s the best thing I’ve done in my life.

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BUILDING BEYOND BARGAINING In the year and a half since their contract was ratified, the members of the L.A. Times Guild bargaining committee have been busy. Schleuss ran and was eventually elected the President of the NewsGuild-CWA. Pesce ran and was

elected the president of the newly formed Guild local, the Media Guild of the West. After Pesce left the L.A. Times for a job at the Washington Post, Pearce took over as head of the new local, which has grown to include members at the Arizona Republic, Pop Up Magazine, and Voice Media. Wigglesworth stepped into the role of chief steward, leading a steward network including Miranda, who is now also an officer-at-large in the Guild local. Bui took a buy-out from the L.A. Times to join the NewsGuild organizing staff.

In New York, Juan Carlos Rodriguez continues to serve as unit chair for the Law360 union. A year after winning their first contract, Rodriguez, Smith, and Godoy joined their guild representative, Susan DeCarava, in running to take over leadership of the NewsGuild New York on an organizing-focused platform. At the end of 2019, DeCarava was elected President and Rodriguez, Smith, and Godoy now serve on the local’s executive committee. The union is currently in first contract negotiations

at The New Yorker, Pitchfork, BuzzFeed, New York Magazine, and several other newly organized publications.

Law360 union member and reporter Danielle Smith with local representative and now-President of the New York NewsGuild Susan DeCarava at a Labor Day parade. Credit: Danielle Smith